TWO    PHASES    OF    CRITICISM 
HISTORICAL  AND  AESTHETIC 


TWO  PHASES  OF  CRITICISM 

HISTORICAL  AND  AESTHETIC 

LECTURES  DELIVERED  ON 

THE  LARWILL  FOUNDATION  OF  KENYON  COLLEGE 
MAY  SEVENTH  AND  EIGHTH,  1913 

BY 
GEORGE  EDWARD  WOODBERRY 

A 


PUBLISHED  FOR  THE 

WOODBERRY  SOCIETY 

1914 


THE  MERRYMOUNT  PRESS,  BOSTON 


CONTENTS 

I.   HISTORICAL  CRITICISM  3 

II.   AESTHETIC  CRITICISM  39 


335970 


I 

HISTORICAL  CRITICISM 


I 

HISTORICAL  CRITICISM 

WHAT  is  the  act  of  criticism?  It  has 
lately  been  succinctly  described  as  a 
repetition  of  the  creative  act  of  genius  origi- 
nating a  work  of  art ;  to  criticise  is  to  re-create. ' 
The  critic  is  genius  at  one  remove ;  he  is  not 
unlike  an  actor  on  the  stage,  and  incarnates  in 
his  mind,  as  the  actor  embodies  in  his  person, 
another's  work ;  only  thus  does  he  understand 
art,  realize  it,  know  it ;  and  having  arrived  at 
this,  his  task  is  done.  This  is  the  last  word  of 
modern  theory.  It  is  obvious  that  it  simplifies 
the  function  of  criticism,  and  relieves  it  appar- 
ently of  much  of  its  old  service.  It  relieves  it, 
for  example,  of  judgment;  the  critic  under- • 
stands,  he  does  not  judge.  It  relieves  it  of  inter- 
pretation ;  the  critic  presents,  he  does  not  in- 
terpret. Strictly  speaking,  it  seems  a  private 
affair  that  he  is  engaged  in,  an  appreciation 
within  his  own  consciousness ;  for  the  public  to 
benefit  by  this  method,  every  one  must  become 
his  own  critic,  since  to  create  or  re-create  is 
a  deeply  personal  act.  I  pass  no  judgment  on 


4  HISTORICAL  CRITICISM 

this  theory  now,  but  I  shall  return  to  it  in  my 
second  lecture  and  shall  endeavor  to  draw  out 
its  fruitful  side.  I  desire,  however,  to  state  it  at 
the  outset,  in  order  to  throw  into  relief  against 
it  the  matter  of  the  present  discourse,  which 
deals  with  an  older  conception  of  the  critic's 
service. 

The  theory  whose  main  position  I  have  out- 
lined, limits  art  narrowly  to  its  own  world,  the 
aesthetic  sphere  of  the  soul  in  which  genius 
works  and  from  which  its  creations  proceed, 
a  world  transcending  that  in  which  human  life 
habitually  goes  on,  and  existing  by  virtue  of 
its  ideality  on  a  higher  plane  of  being.  The 
world  of  art  has  an  absolute  and  eternal  qual- 
ity which  it  imparts  to  its  creations ;  and  one 
feels  this  the  more  in  proportion  as  he  has  in- 
timacy with  them,  enters  into  and  lives  in  their 
world,  and  achieves  its  reality  by  virtue  of 
that  union  with  the  creative  mind  which  the 
new  theory  sets  forth  as  the  end  of  criticism. 
1  But  works  of  art  have  also  a  purely  phenome- 
nal side ;  once  created,  they  belong  to  the  world 
of  phenomena,  and  having  come  into  existence 
there,  they  are  subject  to  the  order  of  time,  to 


HISTORICAL  CRITICISM  5 

current  human  conditions,  to  changing  judg- 
ments intellectual  and  moral,  to  varieties  of  for- 
tune ;  in  short,  they  are  no  longer  isolated  and 
in  a  place  of  their  own,  the  artist's  mind,  but 
are  part  of  a  larger  world.  They  put  on  many 
relations,  and  thereby  enlarge  their  being ;  they 
generate  new  interests,  and  thereby  vary  their 
significance;  and  the  Bolder  criticism  took  note 
of  these  things.  In  brief,  works  of  art  take  their 
place  in  time,  and  give  rise  to  a  history  of  art. 
They  are  terms  of  a  temporal  series ;  they ' '  look 
before  and  after;  "  and  however  isolate  and  ab- 
solute may  be  their  aesthetic  value,  they  offer, 
to  say  the  least,  other  pertinent  phrases  of  inter- 
est, when  taken  as  a  development  in  time. 

The  older  criticism  concerned  itself  much 
with  germinal  origins  and  shaping  influences, 
questions  of  race,  climate,  geographical  posi- 
tion, social  environment,  political  for  tune.  I  need 
only  recall  to  you  the  brilliant  monographs  in 
which  Taine  made  the  art  of  the  North  ema- 
nate from  fog,  shadow  and  damp,  and  the  art 
of  the  South  weave  its  being  of  sun,  color  and 
broad  prospects,  till  it  almost  seemed  that  poetry 
was  a  branch  of  climatology,  that  temperature 


6  HISTORICAL  CRITICISM 

was  race- temperament,  war  and  commerce 
other  names  for  epic  and  comedy,  and  genius 
rather  a  social  phenomenon  than  a  personal 
power.  This  resolution  of  facts  into  general 
causes,  of  particularity  into  law,  of  the  indi- 
vidual into  the  mass,  belonged  to  the  bent  of 
his  mind,  the  mind  of  a  philosopher;  it  is  nat- 
urally irritating  to  those  who  find  personality  to 
be  the  fiery  core  of  life ;  but  his  method  brings 
out  the  distinguishing  features,  as  wholes,  of 
the  artistic  periods  to  which  it  is  applied,  maps 
as  it  were  their  local  and  temporal  emergence 
as  units  of  history,  and  displays  on  the  back- 
ground of  the  common  milieu  the  group-traits 
of  each  country  and  age.  Work  of  all  kinds  is 
the  fruit  of  a  partnership  between  man  and  the 
world.  Taine's  method  brings  into  full  view 
the  world-factor,  and  by  its  emphasis  and  pre- 
occupation with  this  puts  the  objective  element  i 
to  the  fore  in  the  genesis  of  art. 

The  balance  is  redressed  by  the  psycholo- 
gists, who,  in  turn  putting  the  subjective  ele-f 
ment  to  the  fore,  show  as  ardent  a  will  to  be 
absorbed  in  personality  as  Taine  to  escape  from 
it.  To  them  the  individual  is  all ;  and  not  only 


HISTORICAL  CRITICISM  7 

that,  but  what  is  most  peculiar  and  sui  geneiis 
in  him,  his  idiosyncrasy,  is  idealized  as  the 
fount  and  substance  of  his  genius.  Often  it 
would  seem  that  his  title  to  be  reckoned  among 
the  sons  of  light  is  not  clear  till  some  abnor- 
mality is  discovered  in  him.  Criticism  loses 
itself  in  biography  and  medicine,  gossip,  chat- 
ter and  pathology  ;  and  of  late  that  defective, 
delinquent  degenerate,  genius,  seems  hunted 
to  his  lair  in  the  subconscious  self.  In  recent 
years,  too,  there  has  sprung  up  a  third  group, 
a  hybrid  of  the  sociologists  and  the  psycholo- 
gists, which  in  the  name  of  comparative  litera- 
ture has  constituted  of  the  republic  of  letters  an 
international  state  in  lieu  of  ordinary  society, 
and  has  found  its  controlling  factors  in  great  per- 
sonalities such  as  Petrarch,  Rousseau,  Goethe, 
and,  secondary  to  them,  a  vast  network  of  in- 
fluences working  between  nations  and  epochs  ; 
and  in  the  hands  of  these  scholars  criticism 
has  become  an  anatomy  of  texts. 

In  these  various  modern  diversions  and  diva- 
gations, determined  by  the  scientific  spirit  of 
the  last  century,  criticism  shows  a  temper  anal- 
ogous to  that  which  at  an  earlier  time  in  the 


8  HISTORICAL  CRITICISM 

scholastic  world  committed  it  to  logic  in  the 
classification  of  the  kinds  of  literature,  epic, 
drama,  lyric  and  the  like,  and  to  rhetoric  in 
the  formulation  of  the  rules.  It  is  plain  that 
in  all  such  labors,  ancient  or  modern,  criti- 
cism gets  ever  further  away  from  the  work  of 
art  itself;  it  leaves  the  matter  of  life,  which 

f  art  is,  for  the  matter  of  knowledge;  and  when 
we  consider  the  extraordinary  variety  of  the 
tasks  which  criticism  latterly  has  set  for  itself, 
whatever  their  value  and  interest  as  matter  of 
knowledge  may  be,  it  certainly  seems  time  to 
ask  whether  there  be  not  a  more  defined  sphere, 
less  confounded  with  all  knowledge,  for  criti- 
cism to  move  in,  and  a  peculiar  function  for 
that  art  to  fulfil  which  in  the  hands  of  its  great 
masters,  the  poets,  has  been  an  art  of  interpret- 
ing and  manifesting  life  at  its  height  of  power 
in  genius. 

-*'  """Shall  we,  then,  return  to  the  new  definition? 
criticise  is  to  re-create  the  work  of  art  as  it 
was  in  the  mind  of  the  original  artist.  But  how 
to  do  this?  It  is  a  simple  matter  to  re-create 
from  what  is  before  us,  from  the  image  or  the 
text,  "a  vision  of  our  own;  "but  to  require 


HISTORICAL  CRITICISM  9 

that  the  vision  be  the  same  that  was  in  the 
/  mind  of  the  artist  places  it  at  once  in  the  field 
of  history ;  it  is  the  state  of  mind  of  a  man  in 
the  past,  a  particular  man  in  his  own  time 
and  place,  that  is  to  be  recovered.  What  if  the 
work  of  art  be  that  of  a  race  different  in  tem- 
perament, a  Persian  poem,  for  example?  or  one 
of  an  unfamiliar  technique,  like  a  Japanese 
print  ?  or  one  of  an  antiquated  dramatic  habit 
and  a  primitive  morality,  such  as  an  Aeschy- 
lean trilogy?  It  is  true  that  in  art  there  is  a 
/  universal  element  that,  broadly  speaking,  ap- 
peals to  all  minds  that  are  capable  of  receiving 
it ;  but  in  successive  times  it  is  dressed  in  the 
trappings  of  its  own  age,  and  attended  by  local 
and  temporal  associations,  and  though  it  may 
be  interpreted  in  diverse  tongues,  it  has  a  dif- 
ferent tone  and  accent  and  offers  a  different 
signification  in  each.  Just  as  it  is  necessary  to 
read  the  language  before  one  can  understand 
the  text,  it  is  needful  to  endue  the  mind  with 
various  knowledge  before  it  can  take  in  for- 
eign ideas  and  emotions  in  their  original  sense ; 
and,  indeed,  if  one  would  appropriate  the  past, 
as  it  was,  he  must  put  on  the  whole  garment 


1O  HISTORICAL  CRITICISM 

of  time.  The  end  given  being  to  realize  the 
state  of  mind  of  a  man  at  a  past  moment,  — 
it  maybe  in  China  or  Peru, — the  office  of  his- 
torical criticism  seems  an  indispensable  pre- 
1  liminary ;  and  by  historical  criticism  I  mean 
all  those  studies,  sociological,  psychological  or 
comparative,  which  assist  in  the  representation 
of  the  past,  and  amplify  and  clarify  histori- 
cal knowledge.  They  are  essential  preliminaries 
to  that  task  of  re-creating  the  work  of  art  as 
it  was  in  the  mind  of  the  original  artist.  The 
extent  of  this  preparatory  study,  in  each  in- 
stance, depends  upon  the  case  in  hand ;  but  in 
any  case  the  critic  must  know  the  artist  and 
the  world  he  lived  in,  to  reproduce  his  mental 
states  with  precision,  or  even  approximately, 
and  this  necessity  bears  the  more  heavily  upon 
him  in  proportion  to  the  presence  in  the  work 
of  art  of  what  is  alien  in  time,  race  and  method. 
The  injunction  to  re-create  what  was  in  the 
mind  of  the  artist,  when  put  forth  with  the 
implication  that  historical  criticism  can  be  dis- 
pensed with,  derives  its  plausibility  from  the 
'inveterate  habit  of  the  intellect  of  regarding 
life  not  as  a  perpetual  flux,  but  as  fixed.  This 


HISTORICAL  CRITICISM  11 

is  the  mother  of  many  practical  fallacies.  If 
there  were  only  the  European  world  and  our 
own  century,  the  maxim  might  work  with  suf- 
ficient success ;  but  no  sooner  do  we  go  about 
the  world  than  we  find  other  races  and  civili- 
zations with  an  art  of  their  own  which  at  first 
view  is  inscrutable  to  us ;  and  no  sooner  do  we, 
in  our  own  studies,  go  out  of  our  own  time 
and  retrace  the  course  of  our  own  civilization 
than  we  discover  art  which  is  equally  unfa- 
miliar and  enigmatic  to  us,  such  as  Byzantine 
mosaic,  for  example,  and  primitive  art  gen- 
erally ;  and  even  in  the  literature  of  the  past 
there  is  much  which  has  little  or  no  real  mean- 
ing to  us.  History,  indeed,  shows  us  our  an- 
cestors encountering  successively  alien  litera- 
tures and  appropriating  them  as  they  became 
gradually  intelligible,  and  in  each  case  a  Renais- 
sance attended  the  appropriation, —  a  Celtic, 
Greek,  Italian,  Gothic  Renaissance.  History 
unfolds  such  a  flux,  not  merely  of  events  and 
things  in  general,  but  of  art  in  all  its  forms. 
But  the  intellect,  in  connection  with  its  other 
systems  of  abstract  thought  conceived  as  fixed, 
has  elaborated  a  logical  scheme  of  art,  in  which 


12  HISTORICAL  CRITICISM 

all  art  is  contained  and  is  equally  accessible  to 
the  mind.  Art,  however,  is  not  thus  known  in 
the  abstract  like  science,  but  only  in  the  flux, 
in  the  concrete ;  that  is  its  nature. 

What,  you  will  say/ 'is  not  line  the  same 
beauty  in  a  Greek  or  Japanese  or  French  work? 
has  not  color  the  same  value?  is  not  the  human 
eye  the  same  the  world  over?  "  Well,  to  begin 
with,  the  line  is  not  the  same,  and  it  has  dif- 
ferent connotations ;  and  so,  also,  of  the  color; 
and  the  human  eye  is  as  various  as  the  soul 
that  sees  through  it.  Art  is  not  like  mathemat- 
ics, something  to  be  cast  into  identical  formu- 
las in  every  time  and  place.  Art  does  not,  like 
science,  set  forth  a  permanent  order  of  nature, 
the  enduring  skeleton  of  law.  Two  factors  pri- 
f  marily  determine  its  works  k.  one  is  the  idea  in 
the  mind  of  the  artist,  the  other  is  his  power 
of  expression  J)  and  both  these  factors  are  ex- 
tremely variable.  Furthermore,  one  does  not 
make  progress  in  art  as  one  does  in  science, 
along  a  straight  line  as  it  were,  with  continual 
increaseof  knowledge,  conserving  always  what 
was  gained  and  adding  to  it,  proceeding  on- 
ward to  higher  branches.  We  foresee  no  limit 


HISTORICAL  CRITICISM  13 

to  scientific  advancement  in  the  future,  and  in 
scientific  truth  there  is  nothing  dead ;  science 
is  always  a  living  and  growing  body  of  know- 
ledge ;  but  art  on  the  contrary  has  many  times 
run  its  course  to  an  end,  and  exhausted  its  vital 
power.  The  growth  of  art  seems  to  be  in  cycles, 
and  often  its  vigorous  lifetime  is  restricted  to 
a  century  or  two.  The  periods  of  distinctive 
drama,  Greek,  English,  Spanish,  fall  within 
such  a  limit ;  the  schools  of  painting  and  sculp- 
ture likewise ;  and,  in  poetry,  the  Victorian 
age  or  the  school  of  Pope  will  serve  as  exam- 
ples. The  theme  and  the  manner,  the  interest 
and  the  skill,  are  perpetually  changing  from 
century  to  century  and  from  country  to  coun- 
try. There  is  immense  variation  also  within 
the  limit  of  any  one  group :  in  Greek  sculpture, 
from  the  archaic  figures  of  the  gods  to  the 
moulds  of  the  Parthenon ;  in  Renaissance  paint- 
ing, from  the  primitives  to  the  masterpieces  of 
the  art.  One  can  re-create  what  was  in  the  mind 
of  a  mathematician  a  thousand  years  ago,  re- 
capture the  truth  of  the  intellect  wherever  it 
may  have  once  come  to  light ;  but  the  image 
of  art,  that  infinite  variable  of  perception  and 


14  HISTORICAL  CRITICISM 

expression  in  the  individual, — that  is  not  eas- 
ily re-created,  at  least,  not  with  certainty  and 
in  its  original  fulness.  To  leave  out  of  account 
the  difficulties  of  understanding  that  arise  in 
primitive  and  alien  art,  even  in  the  case  of  that 
art  where  both  ideas  and  expression  are  at 
their  height  of  genius  in  our  own  civilization, 
— for  example,  in  Phidias  and  Michel  Angelo, 
— do  you  think  it  is  a  facile  task  to  re-create 
the  work  as  it  was  in  the  mind  of  the  artist? 
It  is  not  so  simple  as  observing  a  sunset;  it  is 
not  merely  to  open  your  eyes  and  see ;  you  must 
first  create  the  eye  to  see  with. 

Is  it  not  our  experience  that  even  with  con- 
temporary art  of  our  own  race  there  is  much 
uncertainty  in  our  vision  ?  Do  we  not  very  often 
have  different  impressions,  one  from  another, 
of  characters  in  a  novel  or  drama,  a  different 
music  from  the  same  poem  ?  In  the  contents  of 
our  several  minds  regarding  literature  and  art 
in  general  there  is  no  such  agreement  as  in  the 
case  of  mathematics  or  logic ;  and  we  are,  after 
all,  well  aware  that  we,  at  best,  accomplish  only 
an  approximation  to  what  was  in  the  mind  of 
the  original  genius.  Art  is  expression ;  what  is 


HISTORICAL  CRITICISM  15 

expressed  is  often  the  vision  of  a  subtle  and 
powerful  soul,  and  also  his  experience  with  his 
vision ;  and  however  vivid  and  skilful  he  may  be 
in  the  means  of  expression,  yet  it  is  frequently 
found  that  the  master-spell  in  his  work  is  some- 
thing felt  to  be  indefinable  and  inexpressible. 
It  is  our  instinct  to  be  modest  in  the  presence  of 
great  art,  and  rather  to  be  grateful  for  so  much 
of  its  meaning  as  may  reach  us  than  to  flatter 
ourselves  that  we  know  it  as  it  was  in  the  art- 
ist's mind.  If  this  is  true  of  our  own  literature 
in  our  own  time,  how  much  more  hardly  shall 
we  be  persuaded  that  we  see  with  the  eyes  of 
the  old  Anglo-Saxon  wanderer,  of  troubadour 
and  mime  and  lyre-player,  that  we  hear  the 
nightingale  like  Hafiz  and  drink  the  wine-cup 
like  Omar !  It  is  often  difficult  to  believe  in  the 
truth  of  political  history  as  it  is  presented  by  this 
and  that  conflicting  writer  re-creating  men  and 
their  actions.  How  much  more  contingent  and 
unstable  must  seem  this  history  of  art,  re-cre- 
ating the  thoughts  of  men,  their  imaginative 
visions,  the  spiritual  intimations  of  the  brood- 
ing life  within  them,  their  guesses,  their  hopes 
and  fears, — their  sojjls!  There  is  a  history  of 


16  HISTORICAL  CRITICISM 

art,  a  geography  and  catalogue  of  it  in  time, 
biographical  details  and  technical  processes; 
but  far  more  than  in  the  case  of  political  his- 
tory is  it  a  shadow-picture  of  the  past,  a  mere 
approximation  full  of  conjecture  and  mystery 
and  blank  gaps  where  time  has  done  its  perfect 
work.  I  do  not  care  greatly  for  the  history  of 
art  except  as  it  exists  in  its  surviving  monu- 
ments, and  I  do  not  care  for  these  primarily  for 
their  historical  value ;  but  I  am  sure  that  art, 
being  as  I  have  described  it,  a  Protean  play  of 
personality  in  many  places  and  ages,  cannot  be 
understood  as  it  was  in  its  original  creation 
except  by  the  full  aid  of  historical  criticism 
in  all  its  forms ;  and  even  with  that  aid  the  re- 
creation of  art  will  prove  still  only  a  doubtful 
resurrection  of  the  soul  that  has  passed  away, 
—a  portrait,  perhaps,  but  one  in  whose  eyes 
and  expression  there  is  an  unshared  secret. 

I  am  not  disposed  to  relinquish  historical 
criticism ;  nay,  rather  I  must  cling  to  it  as  my 
only  hope  of  qualifying  myself  to  undertake 
that  purely  aesthetic  criticism  by  which  I  may 
at  last  become  one  with  the  soul  of  the  artist  and 
see  his  vision  with  the  meaning  and  atmosphere 


HISTORICAL  CRITICISM  17 

it  had  to  himself.  So  much  of  art  is  antique  and 
foreign,  so  much  of  what  is  racially  our  own 
has  become  alien  to  my  feelings  and  ideas  by 
the  gradual  detachment  of  time,  that  I  need  an 
interpreter  between  me  and  this  dead  and  dying 
world  of  the  past, — I  need  precisely  the  inter- 
pretation of  knowledge  that  historical  criticism 
gives.  True,  it  is  not  aesthetic  criticism;  but 
aesthetic  criticism,  in  the  sense  of  a  re-creation 
of  art  as  it  was  in  the  past,  for  me  is  impos- 
sible without  it. 

In  the  same  way  that  I  cannot  spare  inter- 
pretation, I  am  reluctant  also  to  excuse  criticism 
from  the  function  of  judgment.  It  is  said  that 
the  critic  is  concerned  with  two  questions,— 
'What  was  in  the  mind  of  the  artist?  Has  he 
expressed  it  ?  "  To  reply  to  these  is  the  whole  of 
the  critic's  business.  Here,  again,  the  new  the- 
ory narrowly  limits  the  critic  to  the  aesthetic 
field.  The  intention  is  to  debar  the  critic  from 
any  inquiry  into  the  nature  of  what  was  in  the 
artist's  mind,  or  any  examination  of  the  means 
of  expression  employed,  or  any  judgment  upon 
the  value  of  the  completed  work.  Whether  the 
artist's  intention  was  one  proper  to  his  art, 


18  HISTORICAL  CRITICISM 

whether  his  method  was  well  or  ill  adapted  to 
its  material  and  processes,  whether  the  result 
was  worth  the  pains,  are  questions  that  can  find 
no  place.  Granted  the  artist's  aim,  has  he  won 
success?  and  there  an  end.  It  is  assumed,  you 
observe,  that  there  are  no  rules  that  are  binding 
in  the  art,  and  that  the  artist  himself  is  a  man 
utterly  free,  without  fealty  or  responsibility  of 
any  sort,  of  whom  nothing  is  to  be  required 
except  success  in  working  his  own  will.  Such 
freedom  may  belong  to  the  aesthetic  world,  and 
constitute,  indeed,  the  normal  condition  of  life 
there, — the  artist's  life;  but  I  find  these  as- 
sumptions too  sweeping  when  they  are  intro- 
duced into  the  world  of  criticism.  I  say  nothing 
of  works  of  art  in  the  process  of  their  creation, 
at  present;  but  I  repeat  that,  once  created, 
they  enter  into  the  ordinary  world  of  men  and 
there  they  are  subject  to  intellectual  and  moral 
values,  being  variously  useful  or  harmful,  as 
well  as  to  analysis  of  their  technique  in  the  light 
of  tradition.  They  have  passed  out  of  the  art- 
ist's creative  mind,  and  are  part  of  the  larger 
human  world, — a  lower  and  different  world, 
it  may  be,  but  one  in  which  communal  inter- 


HISTORICAL  CRITICISM  19 

ests  and  values  have  justly  a  great  place,  often 
to  the  detriment  of  the  sporadic  individual, 
though  an  artist.  In  the  social  world,  if  inno- 
vation has  its  privileges,  tradition  has  its  rights. 
The  rules  of  any  craft  grow  out  of  experience ; 
if  an  original  and  inventive  artist  finds  novel 
ways,  he  does  not,  generally,  altogether  in- 
validate the  old  rules ;  most  often  he  merely 
amends  and  improves  them.  The  rules  assume 
no  finality ;  they  embody  past  tradition,  and  in- 
corporate new  experience  as  soon  as  it  has  been 
warranted  by  success.  It  is  true  that  genius  is 
always  breaking  rules  and  with  the  happiest 
fortune ;  it  is  the  critic's  delight  to  be  acknow- 
ledging instances  of  this  constantly,  for  it  means 
vitality  and  discovery;  but  breaking  rules  is  not 
genius,  and  criticism  does  a  very  useful  ser- 
vice generally,  in  such  art  as  engraving,  for 
example,  in  keeping  under  close  observation 
the  methods  used  or  attempted,  in  the  light  of 
the  tradition  of  the  various  crafts  where  hand 
and  eye  work  together.  Neither  is  success  gen- 
ius. It  is  still  pertinent  for  criticism  to  inquire 
into  the  quality  of  the  success,  its  value ;  and 
I  am  conservative  enough  to  add  that  the  critic 


20  HISTORICAL  CRITICISM 

may  even  ask  whether  it  was  right.  Aesthetic 
freedom  is  like  free  speech ;  it  is,  indeed,  a  form 
of  free  speech.  We  can  never  have  too  much  of 
it.  But  the  wisdom  of  what  is  said,  the  value  of 
what  is  created, — that  is  another  matter ;  and 
we  wrho  find  in  the  merely  human  world  no 
guide  so  safe  as  reason,  look  to  criticism  to  de- 
clare the  judgment  of  reason  on  the  intellectual 
and  moral  values  of  art. 

But  has  art  any  intellectual  and  moral  val- 
ues? Is  it  not  altogether  aesthetic,  a  matter  of 
sense-perception?  does  it  not  exist,  as  I  have 
said,  always  in  the  flux,  in  the  individual  and 
concrete,  in  the  phenomenal?  how  shall  any  ab- 
stract element,  any  pure  concept,  anything  of 
I  the  reason  be  found  in  that  which  is  by  defini- 
tion a  thing  of  the  senses?  The  doctrine  of  the 
particularity  of  art  is  carried  to  this  extreme, 
that  the  presence  of  the  universal  element,  the 
reason,  is  denied  in  it.  You  may  name  a  bronze 
statue  Liberty,  or  a  painted  figure  in  a  city  hall 
Commerce,  or  a  marble  form  in  a  temple  Athene 
or  Venus;  but  what  is  really  there  is  only  a 
representation  of  a  single  woman.  And,  like- 
wise, in  all  art  and  literature  there  are  only 


HISTORICAL  CRITICISM  21 

single  objects  grouped  in  a  purely  phenomenal 
series,  such  as  life  presents  to  us  in  its  succes- 
sive momentary  flow.  I  do  not  see  that  art,  in 
being  phenomenal,  escapes  from  the  reason  any 
more  than  life  does,  which  is  also  phenomenal 
in  the  same  sense.  The  faculties  of  the  mind 
work  on  the  material  of  art  precisely  as  they 
work  on  the  material  of  life.  There  is  this  dif-  | 
ference,  however,  between  the  two  worlds  of 
life  and  art,  that  the  former  is  a  chance  med- 
ley, an  arrangement  that  happens,  while  the 
latter  is  an  arrangement  in  which  the  higher 
faculties  have  intervened ;  it  is  an  intended  ar- 
rangement. In  the  casual  happenings  of  life  we 
find  tragedy  and  comedy,  but  in  the  art  of  the 
drama  they  have  been  freed  from  incongruous 
and  confusing  admixtures,  and  are  seen  in  a 
purer  form.  Among  the  living  we  find  beauty, 
but  in  the  sculptures  of  the  Parthenon  it  is 
unveiled  to  our  eyes  in  a  more  apparent  form. 
The  intervention  of  genius  has  charged  phe- 
nomena with  something  new,  vital  and  trans- 
forming, namely,  with  its  own  personality.  It  is 
conceded,  in  the  new  theory,  that  the  contents 
of  the  work  of  art,  its  meaning,  is  constituted  of 


22  HISTORICAL  CRITICISM 

the  artist's  personality  expressed  therein.  What 
a  lean  and  diminished  personality  that  would 
be  from  which  intellectual  and  moral  elements 
were  excluded !  The  difficulty  appears  to  lie  in 
finding  a  passage  for  intellectual  and  moral  ele- 
ments into  that  phenomenal  and  highly  con- 
crete world  in  which  alone  art  is  expressed.  Can  ^ 
the  gap  between  the  abstract  world  of  reason  .1 
and  the  concrete  world  of  sense  be  bridged  ?  It 
appears  to  me  that  it  is  bridged  in  art  precisely 
as  it  is  in  the  normal  exercise  of  our  faculties 
in  the  routine  of  ordinary  life. 

The  concrete  fact  of  experience  is  the  base 
upon  which  the  fabric  of  reason  rests,  for  our 
faculties  work  only  in  conjunction  with  such 
experience ;  and  I  suppose  no  one  would  contest 
the  liability  of  the  world  of  art  to  be  philoso- 
phized upon  in  common  with  other  observed 
phenomena ;  but  my  contention  goes  further 
than  that  and  maintains  that  the  artist  may  ex- 
press in  his  work  what  he  designs  others  to  draw 
from  it  in  the  way  of  the  intellect  as  well  as 
in  the  way  of  the  senses.  It  is  obvious  that  the  \ 
concrete  object  is  habitually  employed  to  ex- 
press the  abstract,  by  convention  for  example, 


HISTORICAL  CRITICISM  23 

as  in  the  case  of  the  flag,  or  of  the  attributes 
that  characterize  and  designate  the  goddess, 
such  as  the  doves  of  Venus.  It  is  a  closer  con- 
nection that  exists  when  the  concrete  is  used, 
not  symbolically,  but  as  an  illustration,  in  the 
case  of  the  parable,  for  instance.  The  charac- 
ters and  events  of  the  parable  are  entirely  in- 
dividual and  particular;  but  its  content,  its 
meaning,  what  it  expresses,  is  a  general  truth 
or  rule  of  life.  The  story  is,  in  fact,  no  part  of 
the  meaning,  but  merely  its  organ  of  expres- 
sion. As  one  proceeds  into  the  more  complex 
forms  of  art,  and  into  its  higher  realms,  the 
I  part  of  the  reason,  —  that  faculty  which  takes 
note  of  relations  and  identifies  the  universal,— 
though  it  may  be  more  subtle,  is  still  engross- 
ing; and  to  me,  indeed,  gives  its  soul  to  the 
work.  It  is  true  that  the  creative  faculty  has 
for  its  material  means  of  expression  only  per- 
ceptions stored  in  memory,  which  it  remoulds 
and  gives  back  to  the  world  changed  and  in  a 
new  arrangement  of  line,  color  and  action,  in 
statues,  pictures,  poems ;  but  in  this  remould- 
ing the  higher  powers  of  the  mind  have  had 
a  hand,  and  have  planted  in  it  their  peculiar 


24  HISTORICAL  CRITICISM 

work.  The  creative  faculty  is  not  merely  aes-  , 
thetic,  or  sense-perceiving  ;  but  it  gathers  into  i 
its  energy  the  whole  play  of  personality,  and  is 
a  power  of  the  total  soul.  The  remoulding  of 
the  world  that  takes  place  in  the  artist's  soul 
and  is  expressed  in  his  finished  work  is  a  new 
creation ;  it  is  not  a  mirror  of  what  was,  a 
return  to  the  preexisting  reality,  a  copy ;  it  is 
a  new  world.  Taken  in  its  whole  extent  as  the 
general  world  of  art,  it  is  a  rationalized  and 
spiritualized  world,  the  world  that  ought  to  be, 
an  ideal  world,  though  found  only  fragmen- 
tarily  in  any  individual  or  period  or  country. 
Art  is  not  a  spontaneous  generation  and  geyser, 
as  it  were,  of  the  senses  at  play  in  their  own 
world  of  mere  phenomena ;  but  it  is  a  world- 
creator,  the  maker  of  a  new  and  complete  world, 
one  not  superficial  and  momentary  merely,  but 
a  world  with  meaning,  loaded  with  all  the  sig- 
nificance that  man  has  found  in  his  spiritual 
life. 

Were  art  indeed  to  shrink  to  the  merely 
phenomenal,  how  would  it  lose  its  great  place 
in  the  thoughts  of  men!  So  far  from  being 
the  filmy  material  of  the  senses,  we  have  long 


HISTORICAL  CRITICISM  25 

looked  on  it  as  the  spiritual  substance  of  the 
past.  Men  and  kingdoms,  civilizations,  pass 
away ;  but  they  have  left  a  monument  in  their 
arts,  and  especially  in  the  fine  arts  they  have 
stamped  an  imprint  of  their  souls, — their 
earthly  immortality.  Athens  passes  from  bar- 
barian to  barbarian,  but  on  the  crest  of  the 
Acropolis,  and  in  the  world-blown  leaves  of 
the  Academy,  Greek  genius  survives.  Rome 
piles  ruin  over  ruin  on  the  Capitol,  but  Virgil 
stands  free  of  mortal  decay.  Art  that  is  so  death- 
less can  derive  its  vigor  only  from  the  spirit 
itself.  Genius  is  that  in  which  the  soul  of  a 
race  burns  at  its  brightest,  revealing  and  pre- 
serving its  vision ;  works  of  art  are  great  and 
significant  in  proportion  to  the  clarity  and  ful- 
ness with  which  they  incarnate  this  vision. 
That  is  the  doctrine  which  we  have  believed. 
What  art  expresses  and  records  is  the  spirit- 
ual truth  of  the  past  as  it  was  perceived  and 
embodied  by  the  most  highly  gifted  among 
nations.  It  is  not  meant  that  the  artist,  in  ar- 
riving at  truth,  must  follow  the  way  of  the 
scientist,  or,  in  stating  it,  the  way  of  the  phi- 
losopher. He  has  his  own  way,  none  too  clear 


26  HISTORICAL  CRITICISM 

even  to  himself,  by  which  he  becomes  the  typi- 
cal soul  of  his  race,  embodying  its  convic- 
tions, hopes  and  despairs,  in  his  sympathetic 
and  assimilating  personality ;  and  in  express- 
ing himself,  he  stamps  an  image  of  the  Greek 
or  Persian  or  Italian  soul  in  his  epoch.  It  is  a 
commonplace  that  all  creative  art  proceeds  by 
a  principle  of  selection,  which  takes  from  the 
store  of  memory  what  is  appropriate  to  the  work 
in  hand  ;  into  this  principle  of  selection,  which 
is  the  guide,  enter  race-instincts,  beliefs,  pre- 
ferences, varieties  of  special  knowledge,  local 
and  temporal  interests  and  much  else  which 
the  artist  has  in  community  with  his  people, 
and  by  virtue  of  this  he  is  representative  of 
them.  The  intellectual  and  moral  habit  of  the 
race  and  its  spiritual  outlook  are  a  part  of  this 
common  endowment.  The  artist  need  not  be 
himself  a  thinker;  he  will,  nevertheless,  embody 
the  thoughts  of  his  time.  He  absorbs  civiliza- 
tion, and  he  may  give  it  out  unconsciously, 
obeying  the  instinctive  choices  that  belong  to 
his  personality,  without  any  distinct  volition. 
I  am  far  from  maintaining  that  an  artist  real- 
izes the  truth  he  expresses ;  but  it  is  in  his  work 


HISTORICAL  CRITICISM  27 

with  or  without  his  consent.  He  does  not  ar- 
rive at  it,  as  ordinary  thinkers  do,  by  discur- 
sive reasoning,  formulate  it,  and  so  include 
it  in  his  work;  his  processes  are  more  rapid 
and  vital.  We  are  accustomed  to  call  them 
intuitive  and  inspirational;  but  whatever  the 
process  is,  the  spiritual  truth  remains  the  same. 
He  does  not  state  it  either,  as  ordinary  thinkers 
do,  abstractly ;  he  places  it  before  us,  as  we 
say,  in  the  life  itself, — a  statue,  a  painting, 
a  poem.  It  is  not  the  less  intellectual  and  moral 
truth,  spiritual  truth,  because  it  is  presented 
in  a  marble  pediment,  a  frescoed  nave  or  an 
acted  drama.  Gravitation  is  not  the  less  sci- 
entific truth  because  it  is  manifest  in  a  fall- 
ing body  or  a  revolving  system  instead  of  in  a 
mathematical  formula.  There  is  a  difference  in 
the  form  of  statement  between  concrete  and 
abstract;  but  truth  is  one  and  the  same  in 
both.  In  science  the  truth  is  knowledge;  in  art 
the  truth  is  life.  General  truth  enters  into  art, 
it  seems  to  me,  though  under  a  different  guise 
from  that  it  wears  in  science,  with  equal  ease 
and  certainty  and  in  a  more  vivid  form;  and 
though  it  by  no  means  enters  always  and  at 


28  HISTORICAL  CRITICISM 

all  times  into  art,  yet  great  art  commonly  owes 
its  significance  to  the  presence  in  it  of  such 
truth. 

Perhaps  I  should  amplify  and  bring  out  more 
in  detail  the  distinction  between  art  and  na- 
ture and  their  several  worlds.  Nature  exists  in 
a  fixed  order  with  which  man  can  interfere  only 
slightly,  and  then  only  in  strict  dependence  on 
and  in  alliance  with  natural  law,  as,  for  example, 
by  cutting  canals,  cultivating  soils,  felling  for- 
ests. Nature,  however,  when  it  enters  into  the 
mind  as  a  picture,  is  much  more  plastic, — so 
much  so,  indeed,  that  the  inner  world  of  each  one 
of  us  is,  in  some  respects,  peculiar  to  himself. 
Each  of  us  eliminates  much  from  notice  and 
organizes  what  he  preserves  in  a  fashion  of  his 
own.  The  artist  has  such  a  world  of  his  own, — 
a  vision  constituted  of  what  he  has  seen  and 
cared  for,  of  what  was  significant  to  him;  but 
in  this  inner  world  of  memories  there  is  no  such 
fixity  and  order,  no  such  unalterable  necessity, 
as  exists  in  the  natural  world ;  it  can  be  recon- 
stituted in  the  mind,  and  thus  is  created  a  new 
world,  a  better  world  it  may  be,  which  the  art- 
ist embodies  in  his  work.  He  does  not  express, 


HISTORICAL  CRITICISM  29 

indeed,  his  whole  inner  world ;  but  he  gives 
us  in  his  art  fragments  of  it,  phases  and  mo- 
ments, which  seem  to  him  its  most  interesting 
parts.  Thus  Plato  gave  us  the ' '  Republic ' '  and 
the  ' '  Laws, ' '  an  ideal  state  framed  by  himself, 
like  nothing  that  ever  was.  Thus  the  Greek 
sculptors  gave  us  that  ' '  marble  race  of  gods 
and  men,"  a  perfection  of  physical  and  moral 
beauty  that  had  never  been  visible  before  to 
men's  eyes ;  and  the  Greek  poets  gave  in  epic, 
tragedy  and  lyric  a  vision  of  practical,  ethical 
and  emotional  life,  which  for  clarity,  profundity 
and  charm  had  not  before  existed.  Greek  art, 
taken  all  together,  seems  to  re-create  the  race 
anew.  Similarly,  Christian  art  in  its  mediaeval 
and  Renaissance  masterpieces  of  architecture, 
painting  and  music  seemed  to  re-create  the  hu- 
man spirit  anew ;  and  in  modern  times  the  land- 
scape painters  seem  to  have  re-created  the  ex- 
ternal world — light,  space,  color — anew.  Art, 
you  observe,  is  not  a  reproduction ;  the  reality 
that  remains  in  it  out  of  the  world  that  was ,  is  only 
aresiduum ;  the  characteristic  part,  the  vital  and 
illuminating  part,  is  what  the  artist  has  brought 
new-born  in  his  own  soul, — that  which  never 


30  HISTORICAL  CRITICISM 

was  before.  Necessity  is  our  lot  in  nature  ;  the 
world  of  art  is  the  place  of  the  spirit's  freedom ; 
there  the  soul  criticises  the  world,  accepts  and 
rejects  it,  amends  it,  has  its  own  will  with  it 
as  if  it  were  clay,  and  remakes  it ;  and  the  im- 
age thus  remade  in  his  spirit  returns  to  the  ex- 
ternal world  in  the  form  of  the  completed  work 
of  art.  Art  is  the  place  of  the  soul's  freedom; 
there  it  forges  its  dream,  unhampered;  there, 
age  after  age,  race  after  race,  it  gives  its  dream 
to  the  world  that  is.  It  is  not  singular  that  men 
should  exalt  the  sphere  of  art  as  being  the  high- 
est grade  of  man's  being,  and  hold  in  profound 
and  long  reverence  what  is  elaborated  there, 
and  celebrate  its  great  masters  as  the  heirs  of 
an  eternal  fame ;  for  it  is  in  that  sphere  that 
the  growth  of  the  human  spirit  goes  on,  that 
its  new  revelations  and  enlightenments  occur, 
that  its  spiritual  progress  lies.  What  would  the 
centuries  behind  us  be  without  the  antique 
beauty,  the  Christian  glory,  the  continuing  life 
of  art  in  poetry  and  music  ?  Material  civiliza- 
tion would,  indeed,  remain, — wealth,  trans- 
portation, communication,  mechanical  crafts, 
the  toil  of  the  land  and  the  sea ;  but  the  soul 


HISTORICAL  CRITICISM  31 

would  have  no  annals.  It  is  because  art  is 
the  place  of  the  soul's  vitality  that  it  has  been 
so  cherished  and  jealously  preserved  by  the 
master-races  and  the  master-spirits  of  every 
race.  The  soul  has  written  its  history  in  art,  and 
there  it  still  writes  its  aspirations,  insights  and\ 
accomplishments,  embodying  its  visions  in  its 
works. 

Such,  it  seems  to  me,  is  the  prime  contrast  j 
between  art  and  nature, — an  opposition  of 
freedom  to  necessity,  of  the  soul  to  the  body, 
of  spirituality  to  materialism.  Art  is  the  soul's 
confession.  I  should  be  ill-content  if  works  of 
art,  taken  individually,  yielded  to  the  critic  only 
a  momentary  experience  of  the  senses  and  the 
feelings,  as  if  they  were  merely  disparate  ob- 
jects of  nature.  I  desire  to  know  their  mean- 
ing to  the  soul ;  and  that  intellectual  and  moral 
elements  enter  into  their  meaning,  and  that 

r    v*        £  IfJb* 

without  the  cooperation  of  the  reason  they  are 
incompletely  known,  seems  to  me  plain.  The 
singular  thing  about  the  records  of  the  soul's 
life  is  their  great  diversity  in  different  countries 
and  epochs,  their  lack  of  progressive  coherence, 
their  reflection  of  life  from  various  and  multi- 


32  HISTORICAL  CRITICISM 

form  facets.  Art,  as  I  have  said,  seems  to  have 
its  career  in  limited  and  comparatively  brief 
cycles,  dissociated  and  disconnected  one  from 
another.  Each  school,  each  age,  each  race  has 
its  own  art,  often  highly  individualized  and 
peculiar  to  itself.  Genius  has  an  eruptive  char- 
acter ;  it  appears,  discharges  and  expires,  with 
no  apparent  law ;  each  race,  in  respect  to  its 
genius,  is  a  variable  star, — it  burns  and  fades 
and  burns  again.  The  diversity  of  art  not  only 
makes  interpretation  necessary  to  its  under- 
standing, but  also  renders  judgment  of  its  value, 
intellectual,  moral,  technical,  very  useful,  both 
in  guiding  the  mind  in  its  choice  and  in  estab- 
lishing the  relative  place  that  any  particular 
artist  or  art  period  has  in  the  whole  field.  It  is 
the  extraordinary  intellectual  and  moral  value 
of  Greek  art,  as  well  as  its  fine  aesthetic  qual- 
ity, that  gives  supreme  importance  to  its  works; 
and  the  same  thing  holds  true  of  English, 
Italian  and  French  literature.  Contemplation 
without  judgment  is  a  barren  attitude.  It  is  not 
necessary  that  judgment  should  be  of  the  com- 
parative rank  of  this  or  that,  higher  or  lower, 
or  of  its  legitimacy  or  illegitimacy.  Judgment 


HISTORICAL  CRITICISM  33 

is  not  of  one  sort,  but  various ;  it  may  not  even 
be  explicit,  but  may  reside  in  the  degree  and 
quality  of  the  pleasure  or  pain  felt  in  the  pres- 
ence of  art;  but,  whatever  be  its  particular 
subject  or  mode  of  statement, jsome  judgment  / 
disclosing  the  worth  of  the  work  of  art  seems  to 
me  not  only  appropriate,  but  an  essential  part 
of  the  critic's  service.  If  art  is  to  be  known 
TTistoricaily, — and  that  is  clearly  the  meaning' 
of  the  injunction  to  re-create  works  of  art  as 
they  were  in  the  minds  of  the  original  maker, 
—  then  crUicisjmjaQlist  he.  hnth  hktnriral  and 
judicial ;  it  must  re-create  the  past  in  environ- 
ment and  temperament,  and  it  must  analyze 
the  contents  of  art,  in  any  particular  case,  to 
discover  its  worth. 

The  revolt  against  historical  and  judicial 
criticism,  the  attempt  to  confine  the  critic  to  an 
act  of  contemplation  or  simple  intuition  and 
whatever  may  result  from  that  in  his  mind,  in 
the  belief  that  he  will  thus  repeat  what  was  in 
the  mind  of  the  artist,  springs,  I  think,  from 
a  discontent  with  that  immersion  in  the  dead 
past  of  knowledge  which  is  often  the  scholar's 
lot,  and  from  a  desire  to  confine  our  interest 


34  HISTORICAL  CRITICISM 

in  art  within  those  limits  where  art  is  alive.  I 
sympathize  with  this  discontent  and  this  desire. 
It  is  true  that  in  historical  criticism  the  mind 
travels  far  from  the  w^ork  of  art  itself,  and 
makes  a  long  detour  through  biography  and 
social  and  political  history ;  and  often  it  arrives 
at  its  true  task  only  through  linguistics  and 
archaeology.  This  is  wearisome,  especially  if 
one  is  really  interested  in  art  and  letters.  It 
is  true  also  that  in  analyzing  the  contents  of 
epic  and  drama,  tales  of  chivalry,  Eastern  fa- 
bles and  Northern  sagas,  the  mind  is  dealing 
often  with  dead  intellect  and  dead  morals,  with 
antiquated  methods,  with  what  was  inchoate 
in  the  primitive  and  decaying  in  the  overripe; 
in  a  word,  with  what  belongs  in  the  tomb,  from 
which  as  a  matter  of  fact  much  of  it  comes. 
But  that  is  the  lot  of  the  scholar.  "My  days 
among  the  dead  are  passed,"  is  the  inscription 
over  his  Inferno.  But  if  one  insists  on  re-creat- 
ing in  his  own  mind  precisely  what  was  in  the 
mind  of  the  original  artist, — or,  since  that  is 
confessedly  hopeless,  on  approximating  that 
ideal  as  closely  as  possible, — then,  I  see  no 
help  for  it.  History  is  a  thing  of  the  dead  past. 


HISTORICAL  CRITICISM  35 

It  is  an  embalmment,  wearing  a  mummified 
resemblance  to  life.  Many  are  the  voices  in  our 
time,  beginning  with  Emerson,  that  have  cried, 
4 ' Away  with  it!  "  "Let  us  sweep  our  houses 
clean  of  death,"  they  say,  "and  have  only  life 
for  a  housemate."  There  is  a  group  of  young 
men  in  Italy  who  advocate  the  destruction  of 
the  art  of  the  past  there;  they  say  that  it  is 
in  the  way.  If  anything  in  the  past  is  worth 
preserving,  surely  it  is  the  history  of  the  soul, 
and  if  any  history  is  worth  knowing,  it  is  that 
history.  Any  pains  that  any  scholar  may  be 
put  to,  in  acquiring  that  knowledge,  is  worth 
while;  but,  after  all,  death  enters  also  into  the 
history  of  the  soul,  and  much  that  is  recorded 
there  is  no  longer  vital,  no  longer  of  this  world. 
Yet  it  is  true,  in  realizing  the  dead  selves  of 
mankind,  the  soul  accumulates  power,  breadth 
of  outlook,  tolerance  and  especially,  I  think, 
faith  and  hope  ./The  scholar  who  accumulates 
in  himself  the  human  past  has  something  of 
that  wisdom  which  goes,  in  individual  life,  with 
a  long  memory.  This  is  the  service  of  histori- 
cal criticism,  that  it  stores  and  vivifies  mem- 
ory :  it  is  a  great  service,  and  I  would  not  dis-  \ 


36  HISTORICAL  CRITICISM 

pense  with  it ;  but,  especially  in  the  world  of 
art,  which  is  the  most  intense  realm  of  life,  one 
is  often  fain  to  ask, — "Is  there  no  rescue  from 
this  reign  of  death,  which  is  history,  and  how 
shall  it  be  accomplished?"  It  is  to  this  ques- 
tion I  shall  address  myself  to-morrow  evening. 


II 

AESTHETIC  CRITICISM 


II 

AESTHETIC  CRITICISM 

IS  it  an  error  to  relegate  art  to  the  dead  past 
and  translate  it  into  history?  Works  of  art 
are  not  like  political  events  and  persons ;  they 
do  not  pass  at  once  away.  The  Hermes  of  Praxi- 
teles is  still  with  us.  Is  it  really  the  same  Hermes 
that  it  was  when  it  was  made?  Is  its  personal 
identity  a  fixed  state,  or  does  its  personality, 
like  our  own,  change  in  the  passage  of  time? 
May  it  not  be  the  nature  of  art  to  cast  off  what 
is  mortal,  and  emancipate  itself  from  the  mind 
of  its  creator?  Is  it  truly  immortal,  still  alive, 
or  only  a  stone  image  forever  the  same, —  a  pet- 
rifaction, as  it  were,  of  the  artist's  soul  at  a  cer- 
tain moment  ?  or  is  it  possible,  on  the  other  hand, 
that  such  a  life  really  abides  in  art  as  to  make 
what  is  immortal  in  the  work  greatly  exceed 
that  mortal  and  temporary  part  which  histori- 
cal criticism  preserves?  Let  us  ignore  the  his- 
torical element,  and  consider  what  is  left  in 
the  critical  act,  still  conceived  as  a  re-creation 
of  the  image,  but  the  re-creation  of  the  image 
before  us  apart  from  any  attempt  to  realize 


4O  AESTHETIC  CRITICISM 

what  was  in  the  artist's  mind,  or  with  only  a 
passing  reference  to  that. 

Expression  is  the  nucleus  of  the  artist's 
power.  What  is  expression?  It  is  the  process 
/  of  externalizing  what  was  in  the  artist's  mind, 
C_  in  some  object  of  sense  which  shall  convey 
I  it  to  others.  The  material  used  may  be  actual 
form  and  color,  as  in  painting  and  sculpture; 
or  imaginary  objects  and  actions  through  the 
medium  of  language,  as  in  literature ;  or  pure 
sound,  as  in  music  :  always  there  is  some  mate- 
rial which  is  perceived  by  the  senses  and  intel- 
ligible only  through  their  mediation.  Slight,  in- 
deed, would  be  the  artist's  power  and  inept  his 
skill,  if  he  should  not  so  frame  the  lineaments 
of  his  work  as  to  stamp  on  the  senses  of  all  com- 
ers the  same  intelligible  image,  and  give  for  the 
bodily  eye  what  the  bodily  eye  can  see  in  pic- 
ture, statue  or  story.  The  work  of  art,  however, 

is  not  merely  the  material  object,  but  that  object 

'  •a**"™"™1™*1* 

charged  with  the  personality  of  the  artist.  It  is 
in  his  power  to  make  that  charge  effective  that 
his  true  faculty  of  expression  lies.  The  material 
object — form,  color,  action,  sound — is  envel- 
oped in  his  feeling;  the  words  he  uses  are  loaded 


AESTHETIC  CRITICISM  41 

with  his  meanings  and  tones.  His  personality  is 
immaterial,  and  cannot  be  bodied  forth ;  hence, 
the  most  essential  and  significant  part  of  what 
he  expresses,  that  which  clothes  the  material 
object  with  its  spirituality,  is  dependent  in  a 
supreme  degree  on  suggestion,  on  what  can  be 
only  incompletely  set  forth,  on  half-lights  and 
intimations,  and  the  thousand  subtleties  which 
lie  on  the  borderland  of  the  inexpressible. 

In  so  far  as  a  work  of  art  is  a  thing  of  na- 
ture, it  can  be  expressed  materially  with  the 
more  adequacy  ;  in  so  far  as  it  is  a  thing  of  the 
spirit,  of  personality,  it  is  less  subject  to  com- 
plete and  certain  expression;  and  in  all  art 
there  are  these  two  elements.  In  that  process  of 
re-creating  the  image  which  we  are  now  ex- 
amining, the  mind's  fortune  with  these  two  ele- 
ments is  unequal ;  so  far  as  the  material  part  is 
concerned,  normal  eyes  will  seethe  same  thing, 
normal  intelligence  will  grasp  the  same  thing, 
in  figure,  action  and  event;  but  when  it  is  a 
question  of  realizing  the  spirit,  differences  be- 
gin to  emerge  and  multiply.  Rifts  of  tempera- 
ment and  varieties  of  experience  between  artist 
and  spectator  make  chasms  of  misunderstand- 


42  AESTHETIC  CRITICISM 

ing  and  misappreciation.  How  diverse  are  the 
representations  in  the  mind  finally,  as  revealed 
in  our  tastes  and  judgments  !  The  same  image, 
mirrored  in  individuals,  becomes  radically  dif- 
ferent in  opposed  minds,  and  each  is  apt  to  be- 
lieve that  his  own  is  the  true  and  only  one.  It 
is  a  commonplace  that  every  reader  thinks  that 
he  is  Hamlet.  What  a  number  of  Hamlets  that 
makes !  It  is  a  commonplace  also  that  this  ease 
of  identification  with  a  character  is  a  test  of 
genius  in  a  writer  and  ranks  him  in  power  and 
significance.  Those  who  create  so  are  called  the 
universal  writers.  Whence  arises  this  paradox, 
so  common  in  art,  of  infinite  diversity  in  iden- 
tity? It  comes  from  the  fact  that,  so  far  from 
realizing  the  image  as  it  was  in  the  artist's  mind 
and  receiving  it  charged  with  his  personality 
merely,  it  is  we  ourselves  who  create  the  image 
by  charging  it  with  our  own  personality.  In  this 
creation  we  do  not  simply  repeat  in  ourselves 
his  state  of  mind  and  become  as  it  were  ghosts 
of  him  who  is  dead ;  but  we  originate  something 
new,  living  and  our  own.  There  is  no  other  way 
for  us  to  appropriate  his  work,  to  interpret  it  and 
understand  it.  The  fact  is  that  a  work  of  art, 


AESTHETIC  CRITICISM  43 

being  once  created  and  expressed,  externalized, 
is  gone  from  the  artist's  mind  and  returns  to 
the  world  of  nature ;  it  becomes  a  part  of  our 
external  world,  and  we  treat  it  precisely  as  we 
treat  the  rest  of  that  world,  as  mere  material 
for  our  own  artist-life  which  goes  on  in  our 
own  minds  and  souls  in  the  exercise  of  our  own 
powers  in  their  limitations.  Our  appropriation 
of  art  is  as  strictly  held  within  these  bounds  as 
is  our  grasp  upon  the  material  world. 

It  is  one  of  the  charms  of  art  that  it  is  not  to 
be  completely  understood.  In  an  age  in  which 
so  high  a  value  is  put  upon  facts,  information, 
positive  knowledge,  it  is  a  relief  to  have  still  re- 
served to  us  a  place  apart  where  it  is  not  neces- 
sary to  know  all.  The  truth  of  science  is  stated 
in  a  formula  of  mathematics,  a  law  of  physics,  a 
generalization  of  one  or  another  kind  ;  it  is  clear, 
and  it  is  all  contained  there ;  in  each  specific  case 
there  is  nothing  more  to  be  known.  The  truth 
of  art  is  of  a  different  sort ;  it  does  not  seem  to 
be  all  known,  finished  and  finally  stated,  but 
on  the  contrary  to  be  ever  growing,  more  rich 
insignificance,  more  profound  in  substance, 
disclosing  heaven  over  heaven  and  depth  under 


44  AESTHETIC  CRITICISM 

depth.  The  greatest  books  share  our  lives,  and 
grow  old  with  us  ;  we  read  them  over  and  over, 
and  at  each  decade  it  is  a  new  book  that  we  find 
there,  so  much  has  it  gained  in  meaning  from  ex- 
perience of  life,  from  ripening  judgment,  from 
the  change  of  seasons  in  the  soul.  The  poetry 
of  Wordsworth  is  a  typical  instance  of  such  a 
book.  It  is  the  same  with  the  artists,  with  sculp- 
tors and  musicians.  Art  of  all  sorts  has  this  life- 
long increment  of  value,  and  whoever  has  ex- 
perienced this  easily  realizes  to  what  a  degree 
and  how  constantly  the  reader's  intelligence, 
cultivation  and  experience  are  controlling  and 
limiting  factors  in  his  power  to  appropriate  what 
is  before  him.  In  art  he  appropriates  only  a  part 
of  what  the  work  contains.  It  is  thus  that  the 
great  artists,  Shakspere,  Dante,  Virgil,  are  life- 
long studies. 

A  second  but  powerful  limitation  lies  in  those 
differences  of  temperament,  just  referred  to, 
which  have  an  arbitrary  potency  in  apprecia- 
tion. The  practical  man  is,  as  a  rule,  really 
self-excluded  from  the  field  of  art ;  but,  inside 
the  field,  the  stoic  will  not  make  much  of 
Byron  nor  the  cynic  of  Shelley.  In  certain  arts, 


AESTHETIC  CRITICISM  45 

such  as  the  many  kinds  of  prints,  a  special 
training  of  the  eye  and  some  technical  know- 
ledge of  processes  must  be  acquired  before  one 
really  sees  what  the  eye  itself  must  discover  in 
the  engraving  in  order  to  apprehend  its  subtle 
qualities.  The  way,  however,  is  most  com- 
monly blocked  by  certain  inhibitions  which  are 
so  lodged  in  the  mind  by  education  and  opin- 
ion that  they  effectively  paralyze  any  effort 
at  re-creation.  I  remember  once,  years  ago, 
when  I  was  myself  a  student,  meeting  on  a 
western  train  out  of  Buffalo  a  clergyman  who 
kindly  engaged  me  in  conversation;  and  I,  be- 
ing but  a  boy,  repaid  his  interest  by  flooding  him 
with  my  enthusiasms  for  George  Eliot  and  Scott, 
who  happened  to  be  then  my  ascendant  stars . 
I  recall  well  his  final  reply,  —  c '  Young  man, ' ' 
he  said, ' '  I  never  read  anything  that  is  n't  true. ' ' 
What  an  inhibition  that  was,  in  his  literary  and 
artistic  career !  I  have  since  wondered  if  he  found 
much  to  read.  Ideal  truth,  as  you  perceive,  had 
never  dawned  upon  his  mind, — and  that  is 
the  finer  and  happier  part  of  truth.  The  preju- 
dice of  the  early  New  England  church  against 
the  theatre  is  a  curious  instance  of  an  inhibition 


46  AESTHETIC  CRITICISM 

that  rendered  nugatory  a  great  historic  branch 
of  art,  the  drama ;  and  it  is  the  more  singular, 
viewed  as  a  religious  phenomenon,  because  of 
the  great  place  the  drama  held  in  religion  itself 
in  Catholic  countries  and  especially  in  medi- 
aeval times.  What  Puritan  could  read  the  sa- 
cred drama  of  Spain  with  any  understanding? 
I  have  friends  who  object  to  war  as  a  theme 
of  verse,  and  the  praise  of  wine  by  the  poets  is 
anathema  in  many  quarters.  These  are  all  ex- 
amples of  moral  inhibitions  bred  in  the  com- 
munity and  operating  against  great  divisions 
of  literature.  What  a  sword  of  destruction  that 
would  be  which  would  strike  Mars  and  Bac- 
chus from  the  world's  poetry !  The  American 
inhibition,  however,  which  best  illustrates  what 
I  have  in  mind,  is  that  which  rejects  the  nude 
in  sculpture  and  painting,  not  only  forfeiting 
thereby  the  supreme  of  Greek  genius  and  san- 
ity, but  to  the  prejudice,  also,  of  human  dig- 
nity, as  it  seems  to  me.  Such  inhibitions  in  one 
way  and  another  exist  in  communities  and 
individuals ;  the  appreciation  of  literature,  and 
of  art  in  general,  is  subject  to  them ;  and  I  cite 
these  examples  to  bring  out  clearly  how  true  it 


CRITICISM 


47 


i  .st  in  voluntarily  and  unconsciously , 

in  re-creating  the  work  of  art  we  remake  it  in 
ourselves  and  not  in  its  own  old  world,  and 
the  meaning  we  charge  it  with  is  our  own  per- 
sonality and  not  that  of  its  original  creator.  If  I 
look  with  shamed  eyes  at  Hermes,  Narcissus 
and  Venus,  the  shame  is  mine,  and  not  the 
sculptor's;  if  I  cannot  read  the  old  verses  on 
Agincourt  with  sympathy  and  delight  in  their 
heroic  breath,  the  poverty  of  soul  is  mine,  not 
Drayton's.  In  every  way,  the  responsibility  for  ^ 
what  we  make  of  art,  in  re-creating  it,  springs  ^ 
from  what  we  are.  We  give  our  own  image  to 
it,  just  as  the  original  artist  did. 

It  is  plain  that,  in  consequence  of  our  vari- 
ous limitations  in  faculty,  knowledge,  experi- 
ence, temperament  and  working  always  with 
some  subjection  to  communal  ideas  and  tastes, 
we  must  suffer  many  losses  of  what  the  work  of 
art  originally  contained  and  fall  short  of  real- 
izing it  as  it  was  in  the  artist's  mind.  On  the 
other  hand  there  is  some  compensation  in  the 
fact  that  the  work  itself  may  take  on  new  mean- 
ings that  the  artist  did  not  dream  of;  for,  in 
returning  to  the  external  world  and  becoming 


48  AESTHETIC  CRI1  . 

a  part  of  our  real  environment,  the 
has  resumed  that  plastic  quality  which  belongs 
to  the  world  of  nature  and  makes  it  material 
for  us  to  mould  our  own  souls  in.  The  essence 
of  the  work,  its  living  power  for  us,  is  not  what 
^  the  artist  put  in  it,  but  what  we  draw  from  it ; 
its  world-value  is  not  what  it  was  to  the  artist, 
but  what  it  is  to  the  world.  It  is  common  enough 
Jfor  the  reader  to  find  meanings  in  a  book  that 
the  writer  did  not  consciously  put  there  ;  there 
is  much  in  personality  that  the  artist  himself 
is  not  aware  of,  and  also  there  may  be  much 
in  the  work  which  he  does  not  attend  to,  and 
hence  there  is  excess  of  significance  in  both 
ways ;  and  moreover,  the  reader  may  respond 
to  the  work  with  greater  sensitiveness  than  be- 
longed to  the  creator  and  in  new  ways.  Thus 
arises  the  paradox  which  I  often  maintain,  that 
it  is  not  the  poet,  but  the  reader,  who  writes 
the  poem. 

This  is  more  plainly  seen  when  literature  is 
looked  at  under  the  changing  lights  of  time. 
New  ages  appropriate  the  works  of  the  past  by 
accomplishing  a  partial  transformation  in  them, 
and  unless  art  is  capable  of  such  a  remaking, 


AESTHETIC  CRITICISM  49 

it  cannot  last ;  it  becomes  merely  archaic,  his- 
toric, dead, —  a  thing  for  the  scholar's  mu- 
seum. Homer  has  delighted  ages,  but  it  is 
through  his  capacity  to  live  again  in  the  bat- 
tle-loving and  travel-loving  hearts  of  men  ;  it  is 
not  because  later  generations  have  read  the  Iliad 
and  the  Odyssey  as  the  Greeks  read  or  heard 
them.  Each  age  reads  something  into  the  text, 
as  we  say,  and  this  "reading-in"  is  incessant 
in  the  history  of  art.  It  is  well  illustrated  in  the 
criticism  of  Pater,  so  frequently  called  creative 
criticism,  and  especially  in  his  "Marius,  the 
Epicurean , "  —  a  marvellous  blend  of  the  mod- 
ern spirit  with  ancient  material, — but  such 
reading-in ' '  is  his  most  brilliant  achievement 
in  all  his  essays,  whether  they  treat  of  Greek 
gods,  like  Dionysus,  or  French  gallants,  or  Ro- 
man gentlemen ;  all  his  figures  are  developed 
in  the  dark  chamber  of  his  own  singularly  sen- 
sitive and  refined  artistic  temperament.  The 
same  phenomenon  occurs  as  characteristically, 
though  in  so  contrasted  a  way,  in  the  Puritan 
rehabilitation  of  the  Old  Testament  at  the  time 
of  the  Civil  War,  when  Agag  and  Naboth  and 
their  lives  served  as  the  eternal  pattern  of  the 


5O  AESTHETIC  CRITICISM 

ideal  for  the  Roundheads ;  and  at  the  present 
day  one  often  hears  in  orthodox  churches  a  dis- 
course which,  so  far  as  its  figures  and  colors 
are  concerned,  always  reminds  me  of  antique 
tapestry  and  seems  to  belong  to  some  Oriental 
art  of  expression  rather  than  to  our  own  tongue, 
manners  and  ideas.  Literature,  and  indeed  all 
art,  has  this  magic  to  change  the  meaning  with- 
out altering  the  signs.  It  was  thus  that  the  pic- 
turesque and  mythologic  side  of  Paganism,  the 
poetic  part,  was  taken  up,  absorbed  and  ree'm- 
bodied  in  the  Catholicism  of  southern  Europe, 
and  lives  to  this  day,  little  changed  in  outward 
seeming,  by  the  old  Mediterranean  shores.  In- 
deed, in  much  modern  poetry  I  often  find  the 
necessity  of  translating  the  old  signs  into  fresh 
meanings  in  order  to  keep  the  language  alive 
to  me.  Poetic  imagery  is  none  too  abundant, 
take  it  all  together ;  we  cannot  afford  to  sacri- 
fice much  of  it.  Instead  of  abolishing  battle  and 
the  wine-cup,  the  gods  and  the  heroes,  the  Old 
Testament,  and  what  not,  it  will  be  far  wiser 
to  use  them  in  the  service  of  our  new  ideals. 
Art,  taken  either  as  a  language  or  in  its  indi- 
vidual works,  has  not  one  meaning,  but  many. 


AESTHETIC  CRITICISM  51 

This  is  a  part  of  the  poet's  subtle  mystery  that 
he  declares  he  knows  not  what. 

If  you  have  followed  these  remarks  with 
any  sympathy  and  I  have  conveyed  to  you  my 
belief  that  each  of  us  has  the  artist-soul,  con- 
tinually engaged  in  its  own  creations,  you  will 
readily  comprehend  that  works  of  art  are  not  to 
me  historical  monuments  valuable  for  the  infor- 
mation they  give  of  the  past,  nor  even  artistic 
entities  to  be  known  apart  from  ourselves  and 
as  they  were  in  the  artist's  mind;  but  rather 
such  works  are  only  raw  material,  or  at  least 
new  material,  for  us  tojnake  our  own  statues^T\  \ 
and  pictures  and  poems  out  of;  or,  in  a  word, 
to  create  the  forms  of  our  own  souls  out  of;  for 
the  soul  must  be  given  forms  in  order  to  be  aware 
of  its  being,  to  know  itself,  truly  to  be.  The  soul 
moves  toward  self-expression  in  many  ways, 
but  in  finding  forms  for  itself  the  soul  discovers 
its  most  plastic  material  in  the  world  of  art.  It 
is  in  forms  of  ideality  that  the  soul  hastens  to 
clothe  itself;  and  while  it  is  possible  for  us  to 
elaborate  such  forms  from  the  crude  mass  of 
nature,  as  the  first  artists  did,  yet  later  genera- 
tions are  the  more  fortunate  in  that  they  possess 


52  AESTHETIC  CRITICISM 

in  art  and  literature  a  vast  treasure  of  ideality 
already  elaborated  and  present.  Works  of  art 
thus  constitute  a  select  material  wherein  the 
artist-soul  that  is  in  each  of  us  can  work,  not 
only  with  our  own  native  force  of  penetration 
and  aspiration,  but,  as  it  were,  with  higher  aid, 
—  the  aid  of  genius,  the  aid  of  the  select  souls 
of  the  race.  It  is  true  that  the  re-creation  of  old 
art  which  we  accomplish  is  our  own  personal 
act,  and  cannot  be  otherwise ;  but  the  way  is 
made  easier  for  us,  doors  are  opened,  directions 
are  indicated,  light  is  shed  on  forward  and  un- 
known paths,  sympathy,  guidance  and  cour- 
age are  given  to  us  by  companionship  with  the 
works  of  those,  our  forerunners,  who  have  lived 
long  in  the  soul 's_own  world  and  left  their  tes- 
timony for  us  so  far  as  we  have  skill  to  read  in 
their  text  and  understand  in  their  spirit.  This 
is  the  true  service  of  art, — of  the  poets,  paint- 
ers, musicians, —  to  prepare  the  material  of  the 
soul's  life  so  that  those  who  are  less  fortunately 
endowed  and  more  humble  may  more  readily 
put  on  the  spiritual  garment  that  all  must  wear 
if  they  are  to  be  souls,  indeed,  and  live  above 
the  bodily  sphere.  There  are  other  ways  than 


AESTHETIC  CRITICISM  53 

art,  it  is  true,  by  which  the  soul  comes  into  its 
own  ;  but  in  the  way  of  art  it  is  by  re-creating 
in  ourselves  the  past  forms  of  the  spirit,  vitally 
appropriating  them  and  charging  them  with 
our  own  life,  that  we  win  most  directly  and  hap- 
pily to  true  self-knowledge  of  the  wonderful 
creature  that  man  is. 

It  has  become  plain,  I  trust,  in  what  sense 
it  is  indeed  true  that  it  is  the  nature  of  art  to  cast 
off  what  is  mortal  and  emancipate  itself  from  the 
mind  of  its  creator,  and  thus  to  enter  upon  a  life 
of  its  own,  continually  renewed  in  the  minds 
of  those  who  appropriate  it.  This  is  its  real  im- 
mortality,—  not  the  fact  that  it  lasts  through 
time,  but  that  it  lives  in  the  souls  of  mankind/ 
I  am  fond  of  biography,  and  few  are  the  pleas- 
ures of  the  literary  life  that  are  more  pure  and 
precious  than  the  quiet  and  unknown  compan- 
ionship which  biography  may  establish  between 
ourselves  and  those  whose  works  have  endeared 
to  us  their  persons  and  interested  us  in  their 
human  fortunes  as  if  they  were  friends ;  but  I 
am  always  glad  when  time  has  destroyed  all 
merely  mortal  record  of  them,  and  there  remains 
only  their  work, — only  the ' '  souls  of  poets  dead 


54  AESTHETIC  CRITICISM 

and  gone. ' '  It  is  only  when  fame  shrinks  to  that 
narrow  limit  of  the  book  or  the  deed,  that  it 
rises  to  its  height.  The  Greek  Anthology  is  a 
book  of  pure  immortality  because  it  has  brought 
down  with  it  so  little  of  the  alloy  of  temporal 
personality;  and  that  clarity  of  fame,  which 
seems  almost  a  peculiarity  of  classical  literature 
and  antique  art,  gathering  all  its  lustre  often  into 
one  lonely  name,  is  due,  perhaps,  most  to  this 
freedom  from  human  detail .  The  poet,  the  sculp- 
tor, has  come  to  live  only  in  his  work,  where 
the  immortal  part  of  him  found  expression  and 
lodgment  while  he  was  yet  alive ;  all  else  was 
dust,  and  is  in  the  tomb  which  is  appointed  for 
mortal  things.  It  is  better  so,  when  the  poet's 
memory  itself  becomes  ideal,  and  the  imagina- 
tion paints  its  Dante  and  carves  its  Shelley  after 
the  image  of  the  pure  soul  they  left  on  earth 
when  they  departed  hence.  Even  that  soul,  that 
personality  which  they  incarnated  in  their  art, 
suffers  change  and  refinement.  Only  that  ele- 
ment abides  which  can  enter  continuously  and  \ 
permanently  into  the  souls  of  men,  according 
to  their  several  grades  of  being, — only  that 
which  can  live  inhumanity;  the  rest  fades  away 


AESTHETIC  CRITICISM  55 

with  time.  And  then  this  miracle  arises  that  into 
the  soul  of  Virgil,  for  example,  enters  a  Chris- 
tian soul,  new-born,  and  deepening  its  pathos ; 
and  not  Virgil  only,  but  many  others,  are,  as  it 
were,  adopted  into  the  race  itself  and  become 
the  ever  growing  children  of  the  human  spirit, 
ideals  and  fathers  of  ideals  through  ages.  That 
is  earthly  immortality, — the  survival  and  in- 
crement of  the  spirit  through  time.  Thus  arises 
another  paradox,  that  as  art  begins  by  being 
charged  with  personality,  it  ends  by  becom- 
ing impersonal,  solving  the  apparent  contra- 
diction in  the  soul  universal,  the  common  soul 
of  mankind.  Each  of  us  creates  art  in  his  own 
image,  — it  seems  an  infinite  variable ;  and  yet 
it  is  the  variable  of  something  identical  in  all, 
—  the  soul.  I  often  think  that  in  the  artistic  , 
life,  and  its  wonderful  spiritual  interchange 
through  the  re-creation  in  each  of  the  ideals 
of  all,  there  is  realized  something  analogous  to 
the  religious  conception  of  the  communion  of 
saints,  especially  when  one  considers  the  im- 
personality of  art  in  its  climax  of  world-fame ; 
for  the  communion  of  saints  is  not  a  commun- 
ion of  individual  with  individual,  but  of  each 


56  AESTHETIC  CRITICISM 

one  with  all.  It  is  thus  in  the  artistic  life  that 
one  shares  in  the  soul  universal,  the  common 
soul  of  mankind,  which  yet  is  manifest  only  in 

/individuals  and  their  concrete  works.  Art  like 
life  has  its  own  material  being  in  the  concrete, 
j  but  the  spiritual  being  of  both  is  in  the  uni- 
versal. 

We  have  come,  then,  in  our  examination  of 
criticism,  or,  in  other  words,  of  the  act  of  ap- 
preciation, to  the  point  I  indicated  last  night  in 
opening  the  subject,  where  criticism  appears  to 

^fbe  a  private  affair,  a  deeply  personal  act,  such 
that  every  one  of  us  must  be  his  own  artist. 
Each  of  us  has  the  artist-soul,  and  if  we  enter 
truly  into  the  world  of  art,  it  is  not  merely 
as  spectators,  but  as  participants,  as  ourselves 
the  artists.  It  is  on  this  activity  of  the  soul  in  its 
artist-life  that  the  whole  subject  concentrates 
its  interest.  I  reminded  you  that  from  time  to 
time  in  history  our  ancestors  encountered  suc- 
cessively alien  literatures,  and  as  each  was  in 
turn  appropriated,  a  Renaissance  resulted.  It  is 
thus  that  civilization  has  grown  in  body  and 
quality,  ever  enriching  itself  by  what  it  ab- 
sorbs from  this  and  that  particular  race  and 


AESTHETIC  CRITICISM  57 

age.  Nothing  can  exceed  in  folly  the  policy  and 
temper  that  would  isolate  nations  and  races  one 
from  another ;  it  is  from  the  intermingling  of 
all,  with  their  various  gifts  and  labors,  that  the 
greatest  good  finally  comes ;  and  no  sign  of  the 
times  is  so  disturbing  to  me  as  the  present  re- 
actionary tendency  in  America  apparent  in  the 
growth  of  race-prejudice  and  a  jealous  con- 
tempt of  the  foreigner.  In  this  respect  the  life 
of  the  individual  is  like  that  of  nations.  If  he 
grows,  it  is  often  by  a  Renaissance  attending 
the  introduction  of  something  novel  into  his 
life.  You  are  all  familiar  with  the  splendid  burst 
of  the  human  spirit  which  attended  the  re-dis- 
covery of  the  ancient  classic  world  in  Italy,  and 
you  will  recall  how  at  a  later  time  the  re-discov- 
ery of  the  Middle  Ages  occasioned  a  similar 
flowering  of  art  in  the  Gothic  Renaissance,  so 
variously  fruitful  in  its  turn  in  the  last  century. 
The  parallel  is  easily  found  in  individual  life ; 
such  a  profound  and  developing  experience 
was  the  Italian  journey  for  Goethe,  the  study 
of  Plato  and  the  Greek  dramatists  for  Shelley, 
mythology  for  Keats, — and  everywhere  in  lit- 
erary biography  one  finds  illustrations. 


58  AESTHETIC  CRITICISM 

/.  The  most  arresting  trait  of  the  artist-life,  as 
one  begins  to  lead  it,  is  that  it  is  a  life  of  dis- 
covery. It  is  not  truth  that  is  discovered,  but 
faculty ;  what  results  is  not  an  acquisition  of 
knowledge,  but  an  exercise  of  inward  power. 
The  most  wonderful  thing  in  the  soul  is  the 
extraordinary  latency  of  power  in  it ;  and  it  is 
in  the  artist-life,  in  the  world  of  art,  that  this 
latent  power  is  most  variously  and  brilliantly 
released.  What  happens  to  you  when  you  begin 
to  see,  really  to  see,  pictures,  for  example?  It 
is  not  that  a  new  object  has  come  within  the 
range  of  your  vision ;  but  that  a  new  power  of 
seeing  has  arisen  in  your  eye,  and  through  this 
power  a  new  world  has  opened  before  you, — 
a  world  of  such  marvels  of  space,  color  and 
beauty,  luminosity,  shadow  and  line,  atmos- 
phere and  disposition,  that  you  begin  to  live  in 
it  as  a  child  begins  to  learn  to  live  in  the  nat- 
ural world.  It  is  not  the  old  world  seen  piece- 
meal ;  it  is  a  new  world  on  another  level  of  being 
than  natural  existence.  So,  when  you  begin  to 
take  in  a  poem,  it  is  not  a  mere  fanciful  arrange- 
ment of  idea  and  event  added  to  your  ordinary 
memory  of  things ;  new  powers  of  feeling  have 


AESTHETIC  CRITICISM  59 

opened  in  your  heart  that  constitute  a  fresh  pas- 
sion of  life  there,  and  as  you  feed  it  with  lyric 
and  drama,  a  significance,  a  mystery,  a  light 
enter  into  the  universe  as  you  know  it,  with 
transforming  and  exalting  power.  To  the  lover 
of  pictures  the  visible  world  has  become  some- 
thing other  than  it  was, — even  nature  herself 
flowers  with  Corots  and  Manets,  coruscates 
with  Turners  and  Claudes,  darkens  with  Rem- 
brandts ;  to  the  lover  of  poetry  also  the  visible 
world  has  suffered  change  and  lies  in  the  light 
of  Wordsworth  or  of  Shelley,  but  much  more 
the  invisible  world  of  inward  life  is  transformed 
into  visions  of  human  fate  in  Aeschylus  and 
Shakspere,  into  throbs  of  passion  in  Dante  and 
Petrarch,  into  cries  of  ecstasy  and  pain  in  how 
many  generations  of  the  poets  world- wide.  It 
is  not  that  you  have  acquired  knowledge ;  you 
have  acquired  heart.  To  lead  the  artist-life  is 
not  to  look  at  pictures  and  read  books ;  it  is  to 
discover  the  faculties  of  the  soul,  that  slept  un-X 
known  and  unused,  and  to  apply  them  in  real- 
izing the  depth  and  tenderness,  the  eloquence,  „ 
the  hope  and  joy,  of  the  life  that  is  within.  It  is 
by  this  that  the  life  of  art  differs  from  the  life 


6O  AESTHETIC  CRITICISM 

of  science :  its  end  is  not  Jo  know^^but  to  be. 
The  revolt  against  the  historical  treatment  of 
art  arises  from  a  feeling  that  in  such  treatment 
art  loses  its  own  nature,  and  that  what  is  truly 
life,  and  has  its  only  value  as  life,  is  degraded 
into  what  is  merely  knowledge.  I  appreciate 
the  worth  and  function  of  knowledge,  and  join 
with  Tennyson  in  recognition  of  her  rightful 
re.alm,  but  add  with  him,— 

"Let  her  know  her  place; 
She  is  the  second,  not  the  Jirst" 

The  first  place  is  held  by  life.  It  is  against  the 
substitution  of  knowledge  for  life  in  scholar- 
ship, especially  in  the  literary  and  art  is  tic  fields, 
that  the  protest  is  made. 

A  second  main  trait  of  the  artist-life  of  the 
soul,  for  which  I  am,  as  it  were,  pleading,  is 
that  itjsjajife  ,of .  growth  by  an jn ward  secret 
and  my sterious^rjrpcess .  There  is  nothing  me- 
chanical in  it;  it  is  vital.  It  was  this  aspect  of 
the  soul's  life  which  Wordsworth  brought  so 
prominently  forward,  and  made  elemental  in 
his  verse,  advocating  a  "  wise  passiveness  "  in 
the  conduct  of  the  mind : 


AESTHETIC  CRITICISM  6l 

u  Think  you,  ''mid  all  this  mighty  sum 
Of  things  forever  speaking, 
That  nothing  of  itself  will  come, 
But  we  must  still  be  seeking?  " 

44  Consider  the  lilies,  how  they  grow:  they  toil 
not,  neither  do  they  spin."  That  is  the  type  of 
the  artist-soul ;  in  the  artist-life  there  is  neither 
toiling  nor  spinning.  In  an  economical  civiliza- 
tion like  ours,  leisure  is  apt  to  be  confounded 
with  indolence,  and  it  is  hard  to  see  how  the 
poet  watching 

"the  sun  illume 
The  yello"w  bees  in  the  ivy  bloom" 

is  not  an  idler  in  the  land.  Especially  is  it  hard 
to  see  how  things  will  come  without  planning. 
In  our  own  day  planning  has  become  an  all- 
engrossing  occupation.  A  belief  in  organization 
has  spread  through  the  country,  and  is  applied 
in  all  quarters  of  life,  as  if  success  were  always 
a  matter  of  machinery,  and  preferably  of  legis- 
lative machinery.  Even  in  the  churches,  which 
have  been  the  home  of  spiritual  force,  organiza- 
tion plays  an  ever  increasing  part,  as  if  failure 
in  driving-force  could  be  made  up  for  by  appli- 
ances in  the  machine ;  to  a  certain  extent  this 


62  AESTHETIC   CRITICISM 

is  possible,  but  the  driving  force  is  not  the  ma- 
chine. The  practical  reason  so  occupies  all  the 
field  of  our  life  that  the  result  is  to  belittle  and 
destroy  whatever  has  not  its  ground  of  being 
in  the  useful.  Art,  by  its  own  nature,  excludes 
the  useful.  Art,  in  its  creative  process,  discards 
the  instrumentality  of  means  to  an  end,  in  the 
sense  of  planning  and  intention ;  its  process  is 
inspirational,  as  we  say, —  a  secret  and  mys- 
terious growth.  The  artist,  in  generating  his 
work, — the  poem,  statue,  picture, — does  not 
plan  it ;  it  comes  to  him.  And  when  we,  in  our 
turn,  look  at  what  he  has  figured,  or  read  what 
he  has  expressed,  we  do  not  plan  what  the 
result  —  the  re-creation — will  be  in  us;  one  of 
the  most  precious  qualities  of  art  is  the  divine 
surprise  that  attends  its  reception  and  realiza- 
tion in  ourselves.  There  is  a  part  of  life  where 
planning,  the  adjustment  of  means  to  an  end, 
organization,  and  all  that  belongs  in  the  prac- 
tical sphere,  has  its  place ;  but  the  growth  of 
the  soul  proceeds  on  other  principles  and  in  an- 
other realm.  This  is  Eucken's  text.  Our  bodies 
and  our  mortal  interests  are  subject  to  the  world 
of  use ;  but  our  spirituality,  our  immortal  part, 


AESTHETIC  CRITICISM  63 

is  above  use.  The  artist-life  of  the  soul  —  and 
the  soul's  life  is  characteristically  artistic — lies 
in  the  self-revelation  of  its  own  nature,  and 
this  is  a  growth  which  takes  place  in  a  world 
of  beauty,  passion,  adoration, — in  a  word,  of 
ideality,  where  what  Wordsworth  calls  "our 
meddling  intellect,"  the  practical  reason,  has 
small  part. 

I  well  know  how  opposed  this  doctrine  is  to 
the  ruling  spirit  of  our  time,  which  shrinks  our 
lives  to  the  limits  of  an  economical  and  mechan- 
ical sphere,  to  use  Eucken's  phrases,  and  accus- 
toms us  to  the  dominance  of  their  precepts  and 
methods.  Art  with  difficulty  finds  room  among 
us.  It  is  not  by  accident  that  our  most  literary 
temperament,  Henry  James,  and  our  two  great 
artists,  Whistler  and  Sargent,  have  had  their 
homes  abroad,  and  that  from  the  beginning 
the  literature  and  art  of  America  have  often  had 
their  true  locality  on  a  foreign  soil.  Yet,  what- 
ever may  be  the  seeming,  it  is  always  true  that 
the  soul  grows,  it  is  not  made ;  and  the  world  of 
art  is  chiefly  precious  to  us  because  it  is  a  place 
for  the  soul's  growth. 
;  A  third  main  trait  of  the  world  of  art  is  that 


64  AESTHETIC  CRITICISM 

it  is  a  place  of  freedom.  I  alluded  to  this  briefly 
last  evening.  It  is  not  merely  that  the  soul  is 
there  freed  from  the  manacles  of  utility  and  has 
escaped  from  the  great  burden  of  success  in  life ; 
that  is  only  the  negative  side.  It  has  also,  on 
the  positive  side,  entered  into  a  realm  of  new 
power,  the  exercise  of  which  is  its  highest  func- 
tion. The  soul  transcends  nature,  and  recon- 
stitutes the  world  in  the  image  of  its  own  finer 
vision  and  deeper  wisdom,  realizing  ideality  in 
its  own  consciousness  and  conveying  at  least 
the  shadow  of  its  dream  to  mankind.  It  tran- 
scends nature  in  creating  form.  The  Hermes 
of  Praxiteles,  whether  or  not  one  knows  it  is 
Hermes  and  discerns  in  it  the  godlike  nature, 
gives  to  all  ages  a  figure  such  as  nature  never 
shaped.  The  soul,  also,  in  its  artist-life,  tran- 
scends nature  in  idea ;  each  of  us,  in  reading 
the  play,  may  believe  he  is  Hamlet,  but  each  is 
well  aware  that  he  is  identifying  himself  with  a 
more  perfect  type  of  himself,  such  as  is  known 
only  to  the  mind's  eye.  And,  similarly,  the  soul 
transcends  nature  in  the  field  of  the  relations 
of  things ;  it  builds  up  an  Arcadia,  an  earthly 
Paradise,  an  ideal  state,  a  forest  of  Arden,  an 


AESTHETIC  CRITICISM  65 

island-kingdom  of  Prospero,  a  Round  Table, 
a  school  of  Athens,  a  Last  Judgment,  a  legend 
of  the  Venusberg, — what  not?  —  so  vast  and 
various  is  the  imaginary  world  wherein  the 
soul  from  the  beginning  has  bodied  forth  that 
inner  vision  and  wisdom  in  which  it  finds  its 
true  self-consciousness.  So  great  is  its  freedom 
there  that,  as  is  often  said,  iXJranscends  also 
the  moral  world,  and  so  far  as  morals  belong 
in  the  sphere  of  mere  human  utility  and  social 
arrangement,  this  must  be  granted;  but  the 
subject  is  too  large  and  complicated  to  be  en- 
tered upon  here.  I  allude  to  it  only  to  emphasize 
and  bring  out  fully  the  doctrine  that  the  soul 
exercises  in  its  artist-life  an  unchartered  free- 
dom ;  for  it  is  not  concerned  there  with  practi- 
cal results  of  any  kind,  but  only  with  the  dis- 
covery of  its  nature,  both  active  and  passive. 
The  fruit  of  this  large  freedom  is  the  ideal 
world,  in  which  each  realizes  his  dream  of  the 
best.  It  is  here  that  experiments  are  made,  that 
revolutions  sometimes  begin ;  for  the  ideal,  as 
I  have  said,  once  expressed,  passes  back  into 
the  ordinary  world,  and  there  it  may  be  made 
a  pattern,  a  thing  to  be  actualized,  and  it  falls 


66  AESTHETIC  CRITICISM 

under  the  dominance  of  the  practical  reason 
and  has  this  or  that  fortune  according  to  the 
wisdom  or  folly  of  mankind  at  the  time.  The 
ideal  world  is  very  mutable  in  different  ages 
and  races;  and  history  is  full  of  its  debris.  It  is 
not  an  everlasting  city  set  in  the  heavens  that 
shall  some  time  descend  upon  the  earth  in  a 
millennium ;  it  is  a  dream,  the  dream  of  the 
soul  in  its  creative  response  to  the  world  about 
it.  Yet  there  is  nothing  insubstantial  about  the 
dream;  however  unrealized  in  the  external 
world  of  fact,  it  is  spiritually  real,  for  it  is  lived 
in  the  soul, — it  is  the  conscious  life  of  the  soul. 
There  are  times,  however,  when  the  ideal 
world  does  enter  into  the  actual  world,  and 
partly  permeate  it,  if  it  does  not  wholly  mas- 
ter it.  The  classic,  the  chivalric,  the  Christian 
world  attest  the  fact,  broadly ;  and  in  individ- 
ual life  how  must  we  ourselves  bear  witness  to 
the  mingling  in  ourselves  of  the  poets'  blood, 
— which  is  the  blood  of  the  world.  In  the  in- 
timacy of  this  communion  is  our  best  of  life, 
and  it  is  accomplished  solely  by  the  re-crea- 
tion in  us,  in  our  minds  and  hearts,  our  hopes, 
admirations  and  loves,  of  what  was  first  in  the 


AESTHETIC  CRITICISM  67 

artists  of  every  sort,  according  to  our  capacity 
to  receive  and  reembody  in  our  own  spiritual 
substance  their  finer,  wiser,  deeper  power. 
Their  capacity  to  enter  thus  into  the  life  of 
humanity  is  the  measure  of  their  genius,  and 
our  capacity  to  receive  the  gift  is  the  measure 
of  our  souls. 

Such  in  its  main  lines  is  the  artist-life  of  the 
soul,  alifeofdiscovery,  of  growth,  of  freedom; 
but  what  is  most  precious  in  it,  and  most  char- 
acterizes it,  is  a  prophetic  quality  that  abides 
in  its  experiences.  The  poets  are  often  spoken 
of  as  prophets,  and  in  history  the  greatest  are 
those  most  lonely  peaks  that  seem  to  have  taken 
the  light  of  an  unrisen  dawn,  like  Virgil,  whose 
humanity  in  theAeneid  shines  with  a  foregleam 
of  the  Christian  temperament,  or  like  Plato, 
whose  philosophy  in  many  a  passage  was  a 
morning  star  that  went  before  the  greater  light 
of  Christian  faith  in  the  divine.  But  it  is  not 
such  poets  and  such  prophecy  that  I  have  in 
mind.  I  mean  that  in  our  own  experiences  in 
this  artist- life  with  the  poets,  sculptors  and 
musicians  there  abides  the  feeling  that  we  shall 
have,  as  Tennyson  says,  "  the  wages  of  going 


68  AESTHETIC  CRITICISM 

on,"  —  there  is  our  clearest  intimation  of  im- 
mortality. Wordsworth  found  such  intimations 
in  fragments  of  his  boyhood  and  youth.  I 
find  them  rather  in  fragments  of  manhood  and 
maturer  life.  Life  impresses  me  less  as  a  birth 
\  initially  out  of  the  divine  into  mortal  being 
i  than  as  birth  into  the  divine  at  each  step  of  the 
onward  way.  I  am  always  fearful  that  in  such 
statements,  and  in  such  a  discourse  as  this  has 
been,  I  may  seem  to  be  speaking  of  exceptional 
things,  of  life  that  is  only  for  the  select  and 
methods  that  are  practicable  only  for  the  few 
and  for  men  specially  endowed  with  rare  tem- 
peraments. Nothing  could  be  further  from  my 
own  belief.  The  artist-life  of  the  soul  is  com- 
mon to  all,  as  soon  as  the  soul  begins  to  be  and 
breathe,  for  it  is  in  the  world  of  art  that  the 
soul  lives.  The  child  with  his  picture-book  and 
the  dying  Laureate  reading  the  Shaksperian 
4  '  Dirge ' '  in  the  moonlight  lead  the  same  life 
and  follow  the  same  method.  The  boy  with 
Homer,  the  sage  with  Plato, — it  is  all  one :  each 
is  finding  his  soul,  and  living  in  it.  The  herb  of 
grace  grows  everywhere.  I  have  never  such  firm 
conviction  of  the  divine  meaning  that  abides 


AESTHETIC  CRITICISM  69 

in  our  life  as  when  I  notice  how  the  soul  puts 
forth  its  flower  in  the  humblest  lives  and  in  the 
most  neglected  places,  what  deeds  of  the  spirit 
are  simply  done  by  the  poor  and  almost  as  if 
they  did  not  know  it.  It  is  true  that  human  life 
is  an  animal  existence,  and  the  sphere  of  the 
useful  is  primary  in  it ;  the  necessity  for  earn- 
ing one's  food,  building  one's  lodging,  caring 
for  one's  offspring,  governs  our  days  and  years  ; 
but  if  I  am  in  favor  of  social  betterment  and  a 
more  just  economic  order  in  the  state  to  lessen 
the  burden  of  common  life  and  free  it  from  an 
animal  enslavement,  it  is  not  that  I  am  think- 
ing so  much  of  what  is  called  the  welfare  of  the 
masses,  in  the  sense  of  comfort.  It  is  because 
I  desire  for  them  the  leisure  which  would  leave 
their  souls  room  to  grow .  I  should  be  sorry  to 
see  material  comfort,  which  is  an  animal  good, 
become  the  ideal  of  the  state,  as  now  seems  the 
tendency.  We  are  all  proud  of  America,  and 
look  on  our  farms  and  workshops,  the  abun- 
dance of  work,  the  harvest  of  universal  gain 
dispersed  through  multitudes  reclaimed  from 
centuries  of  poverty, — we  see  and  proclaim  the 
greatness  of  the  good  ;  but  I  am  ill-content  with 


7O  AESTHETIC  CRITICISM 

the  spiritual  harvest,  with  the  absence  of  that 
which  has  been  the  glory  of  great  nations  in  art 
and  letters,  with  the  indifference  to  that  princi- 
ple of  human  brotherhood  in  devotion  to  which 
our  fathers  found  greatness  and  which  is  most 
luminous  in  art  and  letters ;  our  enormous  suc- 
cess in  the  economical  and  mechanical  sphere 
leaves  me  unreconciled  to  our  failure  to  enter 
the  artistic  sphere  as  a  nation. 

There  is  always,  however,  as  you  know,  ' '  a 
remnant."  It  is  true  that  the  conditions  of  our 
time  almost  enforce  upon  our  citizens,  espe- 
cially as  they  grow  old  and  become  absorbed  in 
the  work  of  the  world,  so  abundant  and  com- 
pelling here, —  it  is  true  that  these  conditions 
almost  enforce  a  narrowly  practical  life.  But 
there  is  one  period  of  life  when  this  pressure 
is  less  felt,  and  when  nature  herself  seems  to 
open  the  gateways  for  this  artist-life  that  I 
have  been  speaking  of :  it  is  youth.  I  hope  some 
random  sentence,  perhaps,  may  have  made  it 
easier  for  some  one  of  you  who  are  young,  to 
believe  in  that  world,  to  follow  its  beckoning 
lights  and  to  lead  its  life. 


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